a new york-based theater blog
STRATFORD, ON—In the press room of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building, the tables are littered with cigarette butts, half-filled glasses of liquor, and empty Chinese takeout containers. Reporters smoke, play cards, and occasionally phone their editors, either to report a story or to make one up. By morning, Earl Williams (Johnathan Sousa) will be hanged for […]
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STRATFORD, ON—The play bears Othello’s (Michael Blake) name, but the tragedy really belongs to Iago (Gordon S. Miller), who has seven soliloquies to Othello’s two. This nihilistic, black hole of a character falls on the far end of Shakespeare’s conception of evil, a natural endpoint after Aaron the Moor and Richard III. No production can […]
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Sea Wall and A Life, a pair of monologues currently running back-to-back at the Hudson Theatre, are small, quiet plays. In Simon Stephens’ Sea Wall, a photographer Alex (Tom Sturridge) tells stories about his father-in-law and his daughter; in Nick Payne’s A Life, Abe (Jake Gyllenhaal) oscillates between narrating his own father’s death and his […]
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When they first meet, Jason (Alex Hernandez) confuses Medea (Sabina Zúñiga Varela) for a bird, “El Guaco” or “the laughing falcon.” Likewise, when the audience first sees her, she is flapping a pair of large banana palms, like the guaco ready to take flight. But the comparison is misleading: in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada, an adaptation […]
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Coriolanus (Jonathan Cake) is Shakespeare’s most baffling protagonist, an ornery Roman general who seethes with contempt for both the political elite and the commoners. After the conquest of a Volscian city, Coriolanus returns home and briefly runs for consul. But he refuses to participate in symbolic gestures of respect for the plebeians and is summarily […]
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